Welcome to National Travel Writing Month!

Today launches the first day of the first-ever National Travel Writing Month. First you’re hearing of it? That’s because Christine over at Almost Fearless just came up with the idea a few days ago. Miraculously (to me, anyway, since I’m a techno-idiot), she got the rules, guidelines, and forum pages up and running just in time to launch it for an August 1st-31st run.

Modeled on National Novel Writing Month (known as NaNoWriMo among us fools who await its launch in November every year), NaTraWriMo is meant to be a kick-start for those who’ve always wanted to get themselves into travel writing, or a jump-start for those who’ve stalled in the same career. While NaNoWriMo’s goal is a simple one of producing 50,000 words of a novel in a month, NaTraWriMo is focused more on publication. The basic guideline is to write 31 separate query letters or pitches during the month of August, and to submit at least one to an editor, but Christine has absorbed suggestions and requests to include writing completed essays/articles, spending a certain amount of time editing, writing a travel book, and submitting photos.